Slaya Chronicles

Musings about life, OSS and anything geeky that induces geek orgasm. My personal takes on issues might be controversial to some, so be forewarned. Why Slaya? Am I some blond perky cheerleader who is into bloodsuckers? Nah...you wouldn't wanna see me in a cheerleader's outfit. Life is just too sort for committing mental suicide! I am daSlaya coz I defied the CP!

Saturday, July 8, 2017

I am a life-long chess and FOSS enthusiast and often play my favourite game on my Linux desktops either on the excellent multi-platform PyChess or GNOME Chess. I prefer the latter simply for its cleaner interface.

I wanted to add a really strong chess engine like Stockfish but the standard repository for my openSUSE 42.2 is hosting an earlier version (version 7 vs. the current 8).

So, off I went and downloaded the Linux binaries for Stockfish 8 from its home site. It is a simple zipped archive that contains the binaries for the engine.

I extracted the archive to /opt (/opt/stockfish-8-linux) and proceeded to edit the GNOME Chess engines config file (/etc/gnome-chess/engines.conf); the config file already has a list of chess engines that it supports, so I proceeded to the Stockfish portion and changed the binary= line to the exact location of the Stockfish binary i.e. /opt/stockfish-8-linux/Linux/stockfish_8_64.

And now off to bash heads with the latest and greatest from the Stockfish project.

Friday, August 12, 2016

Previously I wrote about using Infinality Ultimate to make the font rendering on my openSUSE Leap looking fabulous. Well, Yuzery Yusoff in the OpenSUSE Malaysia FB group added that he also added the webcore fonts to even make it more fabulous.

Here are his comments :

"My steps installing infinality ultimate:1. Google "infinality ultimate opensuse"2. Add repo frm http://download.opensuse.org/.../home:nick31:INFINALITY... ( coz im using tumbleweed)3. Open yast>software management and view repo. Choose repo for infinality and switch to it and follow further installation3. After finish with installation, i find "webcore" repo and install "webcore" and "webcore-vista" fonts4. After finish install both of microsoft fonts, open terminal and type this: sudo fc-presets set5. It will prompt for choices. I enter no 3 which is meant for ms ( micro$oft)6. Restart your computer

There u go. The fonts absolutely better, even better than in Windows for me laa..

Because I'm dealing with my peers who still using Windows and Office suite, i need to install WPS Office for exact compatibility

Done. No more just looking tru windows. I ran out from the gates. Go to the open field and play around there...in the open world...hahaha"

Thursday, June 30, 2016

Totem, the default video player for the GNOME 3 desktop has always been a difficult beast to tame when I am using openSUSE. My primary work machine runs openSUSE Leap and as predicted, Totem isn't running - no matter what manner of gstreamer plugins added/removed or removing the ~/.cache/gstreamer-1.0 directory nothing works.

Posting in the openSUSE group in FB got me a reply from a gentleman (https://www.facebook.com/NMMoendjen?fref=ufi) who suggested that I should install xine. That jigged my memory and I recalled installing the w32codecs package to make Totem work. Did a zypper search but couldn't find w32codec package even in the Packman repo for Leap.

If you have trouble installing the package from 1-Click Install, download the package and use zypper to manually install it. Just ignore the "Problem: nothing provides libstdc++.so.5 needed by w32codecs-1.0-20110133.1.x86_64" error message.

Totem, the default video player for the GNOME 3 desktop has always been a difficult beast to tame when I am using openSUSE. My primary work machine runs openSUSE Leap and as predicted, Totem isn't running - no matter what manner of gstreamer plugins added/removed or removing the ~/.cache/gstreamer-1.0 directory nothing works.

Posting in the openSUSE group in FB got me a reply from a gentleman (https://www.facebook.com/NMMoendjen?fref=ufi) who suggested that I should install xine. That jigged my memory and I recalled installing the w32codecs package to make Totem work. Did a zypper search but couldn't find w32codec package even in the Packman repo for Leap.

If you have trouble installing the package from 1-Click Install, download the package and use zypper to manually install it. Just ignore the "Problem: nothing provides libstdc++.so.5 needed by w32codecs-1.0-20110133.1.x86_64" error message.

Friday, June 24, 2016

LibreOffice to me is an indispensible tool. I have used it professionally, even in Windows, since the pre-OpenOffice 1.0 days; when I typed my final paper for my Bachelor's programme. My supervisor was a kindly Englishman that was intrigued that a free office suite of some quality was available at no cost running on the nascent Linux platform.

Since then, I have used LibreOffice for my all my documentation, creating presentation slides and even diagramming needs that I can honetly say that I am no longer be considered productive with the conventional MS Office.

SUSE has always played a crucial rule ("the rebel ringleader") in making LibreOffice into the awesome suite it is today, from the days of rebellion against the draconian Sun contributor licensing and forking OpenOffice into the go-oo (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go-oo) project as a result and later on to collaborating with Microsoft to create an "Enterprise version of OpenOffice" named Novell OpenOffice and later to bring about the birth of The Document Foundation and consequently LibreOffice.

The latest version of LibreOffice is at 5.1.4 downloadable from the LibreOffice site - but for some of us, the "stable" version is the same as the "stale" version - the inner geek in me demands to have the latest incarnation of LibreOffice running on my system (there is a practical reason for this; as I often need to work with MS Office documents, a newer version oftens bring better compatibility with MS Office documents) .

To get the latest unstable/beta version or in SUSE/openSUSE parlance, Factory version; running on openSUSE Leap - you can add it via the CLI:

Saturday, February 20, 2016

Besides chess (or International Chess as the Chinese are prone to call it), I am also enamoured with the ancient mental game of Go (Weiqi in Chinese and Baduk in Korean).

I have both GNUGo and ElyGo Lite on my Android cell and on my openSUSE LEAP notebook I have qgo2 as my frontend powered by GNUGo.

GNUGo is packaged in the standard LEAP repo (# zypper in gnugo) and qgo2 can be easily installed using the 1-Click Install via OBS.

I have never used a Go/Weiqi/Baduk application on Linux before and I seem to like what I am seeing. qgo2 also seems to have the ability to connect to Go servers on the Internet. Never tried playing online before - might just give it a shot one of these days. Back to my game now.